Random

Waves is basically finished now so that means I get to mess around for a bit in the name of “Prototyping”. At the moment I have a vague hand-wavey idea of what I want to make after Waves but I can’t really commit to anything properly until I know if I will have enough money for what I want.

There is however one thing that I have always been very interested in and that’s procedurally generated levels. This is a thing that common wisdom over on the UDK forums suggests should either be impossible or at least so very hard that you would be better off building your own engine instead.

Naturally I decided that this is exactly what I was going to spend my weekend trying to do…

After soliciting a name from Twitter (thanks to ElectronDance for the winner) I set about trying to generate a level in UDK.

The first attempt was horrible and shall not be mentioned again.

The second attempt is below and turned out quite well. In fact it turned out so well that you can download the prototype and tootle around an infinite number of procedurally generated mazes. Seriously there is nothing else to do in it except tootle. No baddies, no pickups, nothing. It’s not a game it’s a piece of tech.

Anyway you use WASD or the arrows to move and you can press G to generate a new level.

If you want to pretend there is a game in there then there is always one really big room that has only one entrance. Try and find it in the dark.

I’m not sure if I’m going to use this yet but it was fun to be coding something that wasn’t Waves (even though I did copy all of the rolling ball stuff from it).

This demo run of 7,742,184 by mr DjParagon is so far the highest score I’ve heard of and beats my personal best by about 2million. If you want to know how to score big in the demo then give it a watch and probably a frame by frame study…

So I’m back home after two days at the Expo. Waves is still there but sadly as it costs a fortune to either stay in London or commute and I am nearly broke I won’t be around to tell people how to play.

First a picture of a complete stranger playing the game:

So if you are planning on playing Waves at the Expo then forewarned is forearmed as they say.

Note: All of this info is actually available in the games How To Play and Controls section but it seems Expo visitors have an aversion to these things.